Donald Trump’s ‘treason’ talk fact check

Donald Trump is always savvy at jumping on a word before it can be used against him. In this case, the word is ‘treason,’ and he’s working it in to every rally speech now. Expect loyal Republicans begin to echo this word on FOX News.

President Trump is using “treason” rather lightly as he assails unidentified U.S. officials for investigating operatives of his campaign in 2016. There’s no allegation or even suggestion that they committed this punishable-by-death crime, if any crime at all.

Trump’s hyperbolic
characterization echoed at the end of a week of unsupported assertions by the
president on trade, the economy, drug prices and more. Meantime, Russian
President Vladimir Putin declared inaccurately that no traces of collusion
between his country and Trump’s 2016 campaign were found in the “exotic” special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller.

A Closer Look At The Facts:

RUSSIA INVESTIGATION AKA TREASON

TRUMP: “My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on. Nothing like this
has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means
long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!” — tweet Friday and retweet
Saturday.

THE FACTS: It wasn’t treason. Indeed, his officials have said they have
no specific evidence that anything illegal was done when the Trump campaign
came under FBI surveillance that was approved by a court.

Treason only occurs when a
U.S. citizen, or a non-citizen on U.S. territory, wages war against the country
or provides material support to a declared enemy of the United States. Nothing
of that sort has been alleged, let alone anything illegal in the surveillance.

FBI Director Chris Wray
told Congress this month that he did not consider the FBI surveillance to be
“spying” and that he has no evidence the FBI illegally monitored Trump’s
campaign during the 2016 election. Wray said he would not describe the FBI’s
surveillance as “spying” if it’s following “investigative policies and
procedures.” His comments irritated Trump.

Attorney General William Barr has said he
believed “spying” did occur, but he also made clear at a Senate hearing last
month that he had no specific evidence to cite that any surveillance was
illegal or improper.

The FBI obtained a secret
surveillance warrant in 2016 to monitor the communications of former Trump
campaign aide Carter Page. The New York Times also reported that the FBI used a
woman posing as a research assistant to approach ex-Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who had earlier been told by a Maltese professor that Russia
had “dirt” on Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of stolen emails.

PUTIN SAID IT

PUTIN: “However exotic the
work of special counsel Mueller was, I have to say that on the whole, he has
had a very objective investigation, and he confirmed that there were no traces
whatsoever of collusion between Russia and the incumbent administration, which
we said was absolutely fake.” — remarks Tuesday before a private meeting with
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Sochi, Russia.

THE FACTS: Putin is wrong about the Mueller report in
regards to its findings of “collusion.”

The Mueller report and
other scrutiny revealed a multitude of meetings between Trump associates and
Russians. Among them: Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who had
promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.

On collusion, Mueller said
he did not assess whether that occurred because it is not a legal term.

He looked into a potential
criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign and said the
investigation did not collect sufficient evidence to establish criminal charges
on that front.

Mueller noted some Trump
campaign officials had declined to testify under the Fifth Amendment or had
provided false or incomplete testimony, making it difficult to get a complete
picture of what happened during the 2016 campaign. The special counsel wrote
that he “cannot rule out the possibility” that unavailable information could
have cast a different light on the investigation’s findings.

CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES

TRUMP, on California Gov. Gavin Newsom: “Talking about forests — clean up your
forests; you won’t have forest fires. Clean them up. He blames it on global
warming. I said, ‘No, try cleaning the floor of the forest a little bit so you
don’t have four feet of leaves and broken trees that have sit there for 25
years.’ … It’s called ‘forest management.’” — remarks to National Association
of Realtors on Friday.

THE FACTS: Both nature and humans share responsibility for California’s
devastating wildfires, but fire scientists say forest management is not the
main contributor. And most of California’s forests are controlled by the
federal government, not the state.

Nature provides the
dangerous winds that have whipped the fires, and human-caused climate change
over the long haul is killing and drying the shrubs and trees that provide the
fuel. That’s not to say California is blameless: Urban development encroaching
on wildlands also is a factor. But about 19 million or 57 percent of
California’s 33 million acres of forests are managed or owned by the federal
government, according to the University of California.

Last year’s wildfire that
incinerated the Northern California town of Paradise and surrounding areas was
the single deadliest such blaze in California history.

Another recent major fire,
in Southern California, burned through shrubland, not forest.

“It’s not about forest
management,” said University of Utah fire scientist Philip Dennison at the
time. “These aren’t forests.”

The dean of the University
of Michigan’s environmental school, Jonathan Overpeck, said Western fires are
getting bigger and more severe. He said it “is much less due to bad management
and is instead the result of our baking of our forests, woodlands and
grasslands with ever-worsening climate change.”

Wildfires have become more
devastating because of the extreme weather swings from global warming, fire
scientists said. The average number of U.S. acres burned by wildfires has
doubled from 30 years ago.

DRUG PRICES

TRUMP: “Drug prices
down for first time in 51 years (& soon will drop much further).” —
tweet Sunday.

TRUMP: “Drug prices have gone down for the first time in 51 years — they’ve
gone down. First time in 51 years.” — remarks May 13 at White House dinner.

THE FACTS: He’s making an outdated boast. Trump appeared to be
referring to recent decreases in the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index
for prescription drugs. But the index was updated this month, before Trump’s
latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug
prices when compared with the same month last year.

The index tracks a set of
medications, both brand drugs and generics.

Other independent studies
point to increasing prices for brand name drugs as well and more overall
spending on medications.

An analysis of brand-name
drug prices by media outlets showed 2,712 price increases in the first half of
January, compared with 3,327 increases during the same period last year.
However, the size of this year’s increases was not as pronounced.

Both this year and last,
the number of price cuts was minuscule. The information for the analysis was
provided by the health data firm Elsevier.

An analysis by Altarum, a
nonprofit research and consulting firm, found that in 2018, spending on
prescription drugs was one of the main factors behind a 4.5% increase in U.S.
health spending. Spending on prescription drugs grew much faster than in 2017,
according to the study.

Economist Paul
Hughes-Cromwick of Altarum, said he expects drug prices will continue to creep
up.

“I would be quite
surprised if by July the annual rate doesn’t return to a more normal 2%-4%
growth,” said Hughes-Cromwick.

JOBS

TRUMP: “And after years of stagnation, wages are rising fast, with the quickest
growth for blue-collar workers. The best statistic of all — and people don’t
know. … The blue-collar worker has the biggest percentage increase of anybody
… These things didn’t just happen by accident. They happened because we are
taking out this power out of Washington.” — remarks to real estate group
Friday.

THE FACTS: He’s claiming credit for a trend of rising wages for
lower-income blue-collar workers that predates his presidency.

Some of the gains also
reflect higher minimum wages passed at the state and local level; the Trump
administration opposes an increase to the federal minimum wage.

With the unemployment rate
at 3.6 %, the lowest since December 1969, employers are struggling to fill
jobs. Despite all the talk of robots and automation, thousands of restaurants,
warehouses, and retail stores still need workers.

They are offering higher
wages and have pushed up pay for the lowest-paid one-quarter of workers more
quickly than for everyone else since 2015. In March, the poorest 25% saw their
paychecks increase 4.4% from a year earlier, compared with 3% for the richest
one quarter.

ECONOMY

TRUMP: “Our Economy is setting records, with more people employed today than at
any time in U.S. history.” — tweet Sunday.

TRUMP: “We have the most people working today than at any time in the history
of our country.” — remarks to real estate group Friday.

THE FACTS: Yes, but the record workforce is driven by population
growth.

A more relevant measure is
the proportion of Americans with jobs, and that is still far below record
highs.

According to Labor
Department data, 60.6 percent of people in the United States 16 years and older
were working in April. That’s below the all-time high of 64.7 percent in April
2000, though higher than the 59.9 percent when Trump was inaugurated in January
2017.

TRADE

TRUMP: “We’ve been losing, for many years, anywhere from $300 billion to $500
billion a year with China and trade with China. We can’t let that happen.” —
remarks Tuesday at the White House.

TRUMP: “We lost $180 billion with the European Union.” — remarks to National
Association of Realtors on Friday.

THE FACTS: This is not how almost any economist would describe what is
happening.

The United States does
have a huge trade deficit with China, totaling $378.7 billion last year, as
well as a $109 billion trade deficit with the EU. That means China and the EU
exported far more to the United States than vice versa. But in return, U.S.
businesses and consumers received goods and services with that money.
Economists compare Trump’s take on trade deficits to a shopper going to a store
and complaining they “lost” money with what they bought.

Most trade experts see
trade deficits or surpluses between two specific countries as economically
meaningless. China’s deficit with the United States is large in part because
many goods, particularly electronics, that used to be made in different
countries, typically in Asia, are now sent to China for final assembly, even
though many key parts are still manufactured in countries such as Japan, South
Korea and Taiwan.

That has lowered the U.S.
trade deficit with those countries over the years while increasing the gap with
China.

TAXES

TRUMP: “We have the biggest tax cut bill in the history of our country.” —
remarks to real estate group Friday.

THE FACTS: His tax cuts are nowhere close to the biggest in U.S.
history.

It’s a $1.5 trillion tax
cut over 10 years. As a share of the total economy, a tax cut of that size
ranks 12th, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 cut is the biggest followed by the 1945 rollback
of taxes that financed World War II.

Post-Reagan tax cuts also
stand among the historically significant: President George W. Bush’s cuts in
the early 2000s and President Barack Obama’s renewal of them a decade later.

BORDER

TRUMP: “The wall is being built as we speak. We’ll have almost 500 miles of
wall by the end of next year.”

THE FACTS: It’s unclear how Trump arrives at 500 miles (800
kilometers), but he would have to prevail in legal challenges to his
declaration of a national emergency or get Congress to cough up more money to
get anywhere close. Those are big assumptions.

So far, the administration
has awarded contracts for 244 miles (390 kilometers) of wall construction, but
more than half comes from Defense Department money available under Trump’s Feb.
15 emergency declaration. Two judges — in Washington and in San Francisco — are
weighing whether to block the administration for tapping those funds.

And nearly all of what
Trump has awarded so far is for replacement barriers and fencing, not new miles
of wall. Even if Trump prevails in court, all but 14 miles (22 kilometers) of
those awarded contracts replace existing barriers.

The White House says it
has identified up to $8.1 billion in potential money under the national
emergency, mostly from the Defense Department.

Customs and Border
Protection officials say the administration wants Congress to finance 206 miles
(330 kilometers) next year. The chances of the Democratic-controlled House
backing that are between slim and none.

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